went hunting for the sun
by someofusare
Summary: Post S1 one-shot. Based on the last moments of the season, all wishful thinking and gratuitous use of 2nd person POV. Christina Wendall and ten years of her life. "You, who are no longer Christina, have two hundred stolen dollars in your back pocket and five murders under your belt."


A/N: So, okay, I know it's physically impossible to dig yourself out of your own grave, but they did it in BtVS, so let's chalk it up to extra werewolf strength and move on.

The following is all wishful thinking and will never happen, even if I think it should. Enjoy!

* * *

_you need the one who slowly burns, and burns to stay alive  
and in this way, you will come find me in december_

nightingale/december song, sunset rubdown

.

.

.

In the end, you claw your way out of your own grave.

It's worse than it sounds.

* * *

For all intents and purposes, you're on the lam.

You've read stories about what happens to girls your age who are on their own (_Lolita_ had made you shudder and shake and have nightmares about men reaching hands over you), and you have a basic idea of how to stay out of trouble. No one can find you, you promise yourself as you saw off your hair in the house sitting idle near the river, ignoring the fact that someone had done so before you. No one can know who you are, you promise yourself as you dye it black. No one can know you're alive, you say as you steal your own money and clothes through your bedroom window.

(This is it, right here. Mark the spot with tape for the next run through. Take a bow. Drop the curtain.)

* * *

You never stay anywhere long enough for some good Samaritan to call Child Services. You tell people at various children's homeless shelters that your parents are dead, which is true. You tell them that no one is looking for you, which is also true, but in a different way. You're fifteen, and you learn from the other kids how to hustle, how to manipulate, how to bat your long, girlish eyelashes so that people will do what you want.

You no longer ask people what their motivations are. You no longer ask people to explain themselves at all, because you sure as hell don't. You wonder if that's what made them all so happy before, Peter and Letha and Alexa and Alyssa and everyone in that one-note town. Their willful ignorance of people other than themselves.

You don't stop to ask permission anymore.

Instead, you run.

* * *

You're sixteen when you lose your virginity in some seedy motel in Maine. He's well over eighteen, looking to feel young again, and you steal two hundred dollars, cash, from him in the morning. It feels something like victory.

You're no longer angry about what you aren't, and you're no longer angry at girls who know how to get what they want, girls who use sex as a weapon. You're one of those girls now, you decide.

Looking at yourself in the diner bathroom mirror, you want to laugh. You've got bruises on your shoulders and sleep in your eyes. Your hair is bleached blond, just like before, except it's no longer white from fear, from guilt.

You, who are no longer Christina, have two hundred stolen dollars in your back pocket and five murders under your belt. You're the _real_ second coming Yeats wrote about, your body in the shape of a lion, your gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.

To think you were ever afraid of yourself.

* * *

You dream of them, sometimes. The eyes that were never really your eyes looking at Alexa and Alyssa as you tore them to bits. Your eyes that were never really your eyes as you ripped Peter apart, killed him before you burned yourself to the ground. You suppose he's alive somewhere, if you are.

You still change, even if you don't kill anyone anymore. That thing that you were was all id, all primitive anger and open wounds, and the thing you were before that was all super-ego, all someone else's voice in your ear, prude, nerd, little girl, vargulf, Hemingway, Hemingway, _Hemingway_. Even in your lucid moments you hated the sound of it.

"What remains?" you ask yourself in someone else's motel room mirror. You're seventeen, and you've been dead for three years, and your hair is dyed red. The moon is getting close to full, hung heavy in the windowframe.

Another you answers the next night, though you never hear her name.

_You remain_.

The whispers in your head build into a howl.

* * *

You're eighteen when you hit the Canadian border. You've got one hundred dollars of stolen money in your pocket and your hair is dyed blue. You can go into libraries now without screaming, and you read books again instead of watching shitty TV on shitty couches in shitty motels.

You quote Rimbaud in a rusted bathroom mirror as you cut your hair into a bob.

"To whom shall I hire myself out? What beast should I adore?"

A truck backfires outside, and the man on the bed mumbles in his sleep.

"What holy image is attacked? What hearts shall I break?"

You, who haven't heard your real names in four years, look at yourself in the mirror and see someone you don't know.

"What lies shall I uphold? In what blood tread?"

You pick up whatever you have left and go west.

* * *

You're in Arkansas the first time you see someone of your own kind. Your fur doesn't change color anymore, and it's dark brown. The moon is full and burning on the back of a white wolf.

He ignores you and chases down a girl who runs from him, screaming. You turn back into the woods before you can see him rip into her, but you can't keep the sound out.

You leave town the next day, and put as much distance between you and the vargulf. You're nineteen, and you've got five murders on your conscience.

You run.

* * *

You're out on the street, in Arizona, the first time you see Peter. You look nothing like the old you, with black eyeliner and honey blond hair (like _Letha_, you don't let yourself think) and old scars and bruises on your skin. You _are_ nothing like the old you, with fifty dollars of stolen money in your pocket and an impermanent address. It's been six years, but he looks exactly the same.

You skip town before you can find out if he saw you, too.

* * *

You're working in a bar when you see him again. You're in California, living in an apartment you pay rent for with some of your earnings and some of anyone else's, and you feel like you should have known. You're not the only one who moves around.

You're older, and your hair is black and cut short, and you hope it's enough to disguise who you are, were, maybe. It isn't.

"Christina?" he says to someone who isn't really you, who died when Shelley Godfrey snapped her neck. He looks bone-tired, and his hair is short like it never was before.

"It's Alexandra now," you say. Alexandra Wills is the name you picked out, and you pretend not to notice how sentimental it is. You're twenty-one, and you've got five murders you're trying to forget. "Are you gonna buy a drink?"

* * *

He finds you again when you're twenty-two, but this time it's on purpose.

"If I didn't know any better," you say on a different street, in a different town, "I'd say you were following me." The California sun burns your dark hair, the color returning to something natural.

"Letha died," he says in response to a question you didn't ask. "It wasn't your fault." His eyes aren't gold, even if that's how you remember them. "None of it was your fault."

(A memory, unbidden: another version of you, one so small you could see right through her, with an orange noose around her neck and white hair from what? from fear? Her name was Christina, you remember, but not much else. She wanted to be a writer. She wanted so badly to live. _It's okay.__ You can kill me, as long as you don't hate me!_)

You smirk, if only to cover up any relief that might shine through the cracks. "Never said it was."

"Christina, what happened to you?" Peter asks, and the sound of your name is awful. It makes you flinch, for the first time since you were fourteen. "Hemingway?"

You smile, this time, because this part of the script is familiar. You turn your back on the gypsy in the house by the river, the boy who swam in someone else's lake, a little girl's first kiss. "Don't call me that," you recite as you walk away.

* * *

You change. It's winter in California, and there is no snow on the ground. It always feels wrong.

Your human eyes and human flesh are heaped in a pile on the ground, and you see that you're not alone. A black wolf, huge and terrible, howls at you.

(_My, what big teeth you have!_)

* * *

This time, you hear him before you see him.

"Hemingway!" He runs to catch up with you, dark hair shining in the sun, leather jacket on his shoulders.

"I thought you'd have left town by now," you say instead of what you really want to, which is, _why the fuck are you still here, Peter?_

He grins, charming as ever. You don't know how he stayed so much the same, but, then. He probably thinks the same of you. "Nah, I thought I'd hang around here for a while. See what's what."

This time, you don't hide your smile.

* * *

"Letha died," he says again. The full moon has already passed, and it's December in California. It's cold the way only deserts can be cold, cold in the apartment where he followed you back after the change was over. "Childbirth. I thought that only happened in the 1800s. In the movies."

"So you just left?" you ask. You can remember the hulking shadow of Roman Godfrey, the long, smooth lines of his body carved like some Greek statue, his eyes more wild than a dog's. You've read the papers. Everyone is dead or gone or both.

"Yeah," he nods, "but so did you."

"I died. It's different," you protest. Your hair is dark, and you're goddamn tired, and Peter is as handsome as you remembered. You've got five murders weighing you down and blood under your nails.

"Yeah," he sighs. "So did I, Hemingway."

This time you don't correct him. Watch the ceiling fan circle like a vulture overhead.

* * *

You're twenty-three when Peter Rumancek kisses you, and it feels like something has come full circle, but you don't know what.

"I should've done something," he mutters against your mouth. "I should've come back for you, I should've protected you."

You don't tell him that you're no longer the girl that needed protection. "It's okay," you say instead.

When you fuck him, he presses his mouth hard against yours, closes his eyes like it hurts. His hands on your body, his hands around your neck, your neck inside a makeshift noose. He calls you Christina when he comes, and it doesn't feel like revenge so much as karma.

After, you let him whisper against your skin, words in a language you don't know.

* * *

It's the tenth anniversary of the Hemlock Grove Massacre, ten years since the murder of Christina Wendall. Peter lights a candle for a shrine in your house, in an old, beat-up home by a river. You watch the light flicker around a fourteen-year-old girl's face, burning the edges of the photograph you spin over the fire.

You're twenty-four, and your hair is long and dark. You've got twenty dollars of stolen money in your back pocket, five murders to atone for, and someone else's hand in yours. You watch the picture burn in your palm, and you laugh. Peter smiles when you turn to him.

(_What remains?_ you ask yourself, and another part of you, one that was probably always there, replies.)


End file.
